SDI (Serial Digital Interface) is a digital video over coax standard with up to 540Mbs of bandwidth. For now it’s only found on high-end a/v hardware. Retired broadcast engineer Robert Cobler hacked a SDI interface into his his satellite reciever and Danny Mavromatis did his DVD changer for the ultimate in digital video quality. Robert built the ‘Poor Mans SDI‘ to show that SDI doesn’t need to be expensive. He interfaced a National CLC020 to the Bt865 video chip and added some logic hardware to impliment the required SAV/EAV signals. If you’ve got the right video chip(with the right clock), you can use the evaluation kit to make your own. Check out danny’s blog entry for a beautiful screen capture.
[Update: The DVD mod is by Danny Mavromatis – Robert wrote up the satellite mod on AVSforum – Thanks Scott]
Month: August 2006
Improved VW Solar Charger
VW has been shipping their cars to the US with small solar panels inside to keep the batteries from going dead during shipment. Dick Streefland picked one up and added a small monitor circuit to monitor and charge his battery. Batwatch is based on the Atmel ATtiny13V and measures the voltage on two sides of a resister to determine the voltage of the battery while the solar panel is charging the system.
Water Cooled CCD
Most ccd hacks today are based around modding webcams. Back in 2000, amateur astronomer ‘astroturtle’ built his own water cooled CCD camera. It was based on the long discontinued Texas Instruments TC245 CCD chip. Water cooling enhanced by a peltier junction is neccesary just to keep the chip cool enough during operation. The result? 378×242 pixels and a 2 second refresh rate.
Scrounged Coffee Roaster
I’ve been known to modify an innocent kitchen appliance or two, but Derek Bradford has me beat. Derek is on the third iteration of his ‘uglyroast‘ coffee roaster. Since the nearest Home Depot is a continent away, he’s limited to simple parts and tools. The beans are heated with a gas stove. The second version used an electric fan and a camp stove. The latest one has a dedicated motor and sits over a gas range.
Gas Powered Blender
I’m attending the funeral of my best friend’s father today. As a mechanical engineer, I always admired the man as an excellent machinist. What follows is a post I wrote last year about his gas powered blender. You’ll be sorely missed Mr. Frost.
My roommate Frosty has often joked about how many lawnmowers and weedeaters his dad has laying around. It seems that his dad has decided to take care of the clutter and I, for one, am scared. Yes my friends, a gas powered blender. It has been done before, but you’ve got to respect Greg’s scratch building prowess. Finally you can vaporize ice in mere seconds and with the way the handle bars are mounted it’s guaranteed to make the goofying process far more intimate than usual. By my count this means he still has four more engines in the garage; I don’t know what’s next, but god help us all.
Xen On Intel Mac Mini
The Scalable Computing Laboratory has posted instructions on how to get Xen running on a Intel Mac mini. Xen is an open source virtualization system that lets multiple guest operating systems run on the same processor. The Mac mini is small, relatively inexpensive, and because it supports VT instructions you can run WindowsXP without modification. This makes the mini a really good choice for a hardware virtualization box. The install does have some quirks. You need a distro that uses lilo to boot because of Mac mini’s lack of an A20 gate. Once installed you switch to a patched version of grub because that’s what Xen requires.
[thanks steve, the good steve]
Cupric Chloride Etching
Cupric chloride is generally considered a better etchant even though it is not as well known as ferric chloride. [Rolan Yang] has a photoset of the process. Cupric chloride is usually sold as a photography chemical. The best feature is that the solution can be regenerated so you won’t be disposing of nearly as much etchant. I found a great page detailing the process for the hobbyist.
